Sunday, July 27, 2014

Shocked at increasing death toll in Gaza, I was wondering what exactly led to this new round of violence? Found 2 articles below....one from New York Times and one from Al Jazeera

Look Carefully at Who Started the Current Israel-Hamas Conflict

Ghada Ageel
is a visiting professor of political science at the University of
Alberta and active in the Faculty4Palestine-Alberta. A third generation
Palestinian refugee, she was born and raised in the Khan Younis Refugee
Camp in the Gaza Strip.

Updated July 22, 2014, 5:27 PM

Israeli officials think they can get away with murder by
blaming everything on Hamas and – in the dehumanizing words of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel – those “telegenically dead
Palestinians.”

Such debased language makes it easier to kill the innocent – a
routine occurrence for this month, most obscenely when four boys were
killed on a Gaza beach last week. Those were not human shields but four
children being children. “There is no safe place in Gaza right now,”
Tyler Hicks said after photographing the boys for The New York Times. “Bombs can land at any time, anywhere.”

Blaming
Hamas rockets for instigating the Israeli attacks ignores Israel's
provocations in the West Bank and a history of subjugation.

Blaming Hamas rockets for instigating the Israeli attacks ignores what preceded those rocket launchings. The Times of Israel reported
that Hamas had fired missiles on June 30, for the first time since the
November 2012 cease-fire, “in revenge for an Israeli airstrike several
hours earlier.” Earlier rocket fire came from other groups in Gaza
which, the article notes, Hamas had tried to stop.

Before that, Israel rampaged
through the West Bank after three young Israeli settlers were
kidnapped, even though the Israelis apparently knew they were already
dead. This ratcheted up tensions over an action that Hamas leaders in
Gaza appear not to have authorized.
Israel somehow thinks it can kill civilians in the West Bank, arrest
hundreds, and harass thousands and not be blamed for starting this round
of violence with Palestinians.

The subsequent grisly slaying of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir, the
brutal police beating of his 15-year-old cousin, the
Palestinian-American Tareq Abu Khdeir, and the mobs shouting “Death to
the Arabs,” also created an ugly climate on which Netanyahu rode into
Gaza.

Besides, while states have the right to defend themselves, so do
people under occupation. Despite the Israeli claim that it no longer
occupies Gaza, Israel effectively controls the strip – particularly the
air and sea – and, in conjunction with Egypt, the borders, too.

When Israel demands that Palestinians flee their homes, is it not
legitimate self-defense to say Israel did this once before and will pass
through my neighborhood over my dead body?

Seventy percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees. We are in Gaza
because Israel expelled over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, including my
grandmother and grandfather and both my parents from Beit Daras.

With over 600 Palestinians killed in the current assault, most of them civilians, a far-reaching cease-fire is now needed.

Hamas can hold a cease-fire just as it did
in November 2012. The real question is whether Israel will give up its
brutal control of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing
people to move and export products to grow our economy, and live with a
semblance of freedom from occupation after years of Israeli siege and
subjugation.New York Times,22/7/2014,

Israel, not Hamas, orchestrated the latest conflict in Gaza

Washington's ironclad support for Israel provides effective shield for war crimes

July 22, 20149:30AM ET

by
Musa al-Gharbi
@Musa_alGharbi

In the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, the dominant
discourse is that the Palestinian militants provoked the hostilities —
while Israel, as President Barack Obama affirmed last week, is acting in
legitimate self-defense. Many have attempted to problematize this narrative, for instance by arguing that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have a legitimate legal or moral claim to self-defense. Others have argued that rockets fired by Hamas do not constitute an existential crisis for Israel or its citizens and certainly did not warrant the killing of more than 500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including women and children.

While these are all valid and important points, the broader narrative
remains largely unchallenged: Hamas began firing rockets at Israel
first, triggering Israel’s latest military incursion. This is not true.
In fact, far from acting in self-defense, the crisis is the result of
deliberate actions by Israel over the last few weeks — first to stir up
anti-Arab sentiment among the Israeli population and then to provoke
Hamas into open conflict.

Israeli provocations

The current escalation began with the abduction of three Israeli
teenagers from settlements in the West Bank. The fact that the three
were kidnapped from settlements is an important detail that is often
passed over far too quickly or overlooked altogether. The settlements,
what they represent and how the settlers interact with the Palestinian
population form a critical part of the episode’s context.

After the kidnapping, for more than two weeks Israeli authorities put
on a show of looking for the missing teens — the whole time whipping up
anti-Arab sentiment, raising hopes of a recovery and marginalizing
voices of dissent. When the abductees were found murdered, the Israeli
public was outraged and demanded vengeance. Shortly after the funerals
for the youths, another group of Israeli settlers beat and burned to death a 16-year-old Palestinian teen, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. This incident was followed by a brutal assault on Tariq Khdeir, a 15-year-old U.S. citizen and cousin of Mohammed’s by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Knowing that the teens were already dead, the Israeli government even sent the mothers of the abductees to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to raise international awareness and plead for their boys’ safe return. Then the IDF launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, the most extensive
military operation in the West Bank for more than a decade, under the
auspices of saving the missing teens whom, again, they knew to be
deceased.

The blame for their abduction immediately went to Hamas, which denied any involvement
in the kidnapping. Israel has offered no concrete proof to implicate
Hamas — instead identifying as its prime suspects a rogue faction with a
history of defying Hamas’ leadership
and sabotaging the group’s peace-building efforts. They were identified
early on, meaning that Israel knew full well that neither Hamas nor its
armed wing (al-Qassam Brigades) were behind the boys’ disappearance.
Nonetheless, the IDF began a military campaign against them and de facto
the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.

Given
Washington’s unwavering and iron-clad commitment to Israel and the
United States’ veto power at the Security Council, there is no
enforcement mechanism to hold Israel accountable.

On June 17, Israel rearrested 50 Palestinian prisoners set free in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap with Hamas — a bold provocation that violates its armistice with Hamas. Without cause, the IDF also rounded up a number of clerics, intellectuals and politicians
affiliated with or known to be sympathetic toward Hamas. It also raided
hundreds of Palestinian sites, including homes, businesses,
universities and clinics — in the process pillaging more than $3 million in cash and property,
in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Scores of Palestinian
civilians were killed in these operations — again, before rockets were
fired from Gaza. The misery of the civilian population was compounded by
IDF checkpoints and curfews that severely restrict the movement of the
Palestinian people, during Ramadan, no less.

In mid-June, in preparation for the reprisal attacks from Hamas that
the IDF was attempting to provoke, it moved its Iron Dome batteries into
southern Israeli cities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then called
on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the unity government with Hamas — reiterating previous threats of punitive measures unless the union is suspended. Meanwhile, the IDF began calling up reserve troops in anticipation of the ground assault.

All these provocations came weeks before Hamas fired the first
rockets into Israel. As such, contrary to Obama’s claims and the widely
held narrative in Western media, it was in fact Hamas that was acting in
self-defense. Israel doggedly sought out this war, and Hamas gave it to them.

Continued deception

All the illegal and immoral actions related to Operation Brother’s
Keeper were justified under the premise of finding and saving the
missing teens whom the Israeli government knew to be dead — cynically
exploiting the tragedy to whip up public outcry in order to provoke and
then confront Hamas. This pattern of deception continues under the
ongoing military offensive in Gaza. For example, last week in
collaboration with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi and Abbas, in
its efforts to alienate Hamas, Israel announced a bad-faith cease-fire proposal,
which Hamas was not consulted on and never agreed to but whose
violation supposedly justified Israel’s expansion and intensification of
the military campaign into Gaza.

In response to Israel’s faux peace offering, Hamas issued 10 conditions for a 10-year truce, including
the release of Palestinian political prisoners, an easing of the
blockade at seaports and airports, allowing Gazans to visit Jerusalem to
pray at al-Aqsa Mosque and a commitment from Israel to refrain from
meddling in Palestinian politics — particularly on matters related to
the unity government. Not only are Hamas’ demands reasonable, but they
are also aimed at making life in Gaza more bearable. But the Israeli
government has not even considered the proposal to date. Hamas then put
forward a smaller deal for a truce
with Qatar and Turkey, which was given to U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry to mediate with Israel. There has been little action on this
proposal either.

The Israeli incursion, which human rights groups have called a war crime,
has destroyed hospitals, schools, places of worship, residential areas
and critical infrastructure, which explains why most of the Palestinian
casualties have been civilians. The same cannot be said of the Israeli
fatalities. As of July 21, two Israeli civilians and 25 soldiers have been killed since the latest campaign began. One of those civilians was hit by a mortar while delivering provisions to soldiers
at the border with the Gaza Strip. Hence the soldiers and at least one
of the civilians were directly involved in a military campaign, making
them legitimate targets.

Yet unfortunately for the Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza with no way out, the conflict’s dominant narratives continue to suggest the exact opposite of the realities on the ground.

Musa al-Gharbi is a research fellow at the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC). He has an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arizona.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.-Al Jazeera America,22/7/2014,

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